Witcher combat

After writing about the general game flow of 🗡️Witcher: The Old World last time, I wanted to give a bit more of a spotlight to combat. It’s a clever combo system with cards and some really cool ideas! 🙃

Whenever you share a space with a monster or a rival witcher, you can choose to fight them as your main action. As soon as combat begins, you shuffle your deck and discard together - you keep your hand of cards. The brilliant idea is that your deck of cards symbolizes your health. If you take damage you discard cards; if you completely run out of cards, you are knocked out! 😵 Also, if you move around a lot on your turn, you will start with less cards in combat to show that you are exhausted. I love it! 😊

In a combat turn you can play a card, or more if you can connect them through matching colors. You then deal damage, raise your shield value, and modify the amount of cards you draw at the end of the combat round, all depending on what icons your linked cards show. The bigger combo you play, the more you rush towards depleting your own deck, but you also do more stuff. It’s a fun dynamic, and it’s basically always worth it to do big combos. 💪 During the game you are also trying to buy cards for yourself that allows you to make more combos.

Witchers will fight against each other in this manner, but if you fight a monster they have their own deck. You take as many monster attack cards as the monster’s health - whenever they act, they draw one, and if they take damage they discard from here. To combat player downtime, another player will draw for the monster and decide if they “bite” or “charge” (whether they do the top or bottom effect of the card). This is random, but at least you get to do something out of your turn. 😃 Certain monster effects will scale with monster level, so even though they all use the same deck, tougher monsters will fight tougher.

Your attributes determine how many cards you draw in combat rounds, what your max shield value is, how many potions you can drink, and each Witcher School has an asymmetric ability too! 😁
I think this system is super cool - you have some agency and fights flow nicely!